Prior Industry Experience Research Articles

Second-Career Academics and the Influence of ‘Professionalism’ in Higher Education: A Phenomenographic Study in STEM

This article examines the phenomenon whereby ‘professionalism’ is used as a concept in higher education (HE), specifically regarding HE’s relationships with professions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We examine the implications for human development arising from the influence of professionalism in HE, presenting the qualitative interpretations of second-career academics, a term we use to describe university teaching staff recruited for their prior industrial experience in STEM professions. Using a phenomenographic approach, we examine the conception of second-career academics and how professionalism influences educational policy and practice in HE. We present four successively inclusive conceptions of experiences, with professionalism expressed as making normative judgements of students’ interactions and behaviours, negotiating those interactions and behaviours with students, critiquing the professional applicability of curricula and activities, and changing those curricula and activities to suit the needs of STEM professions. These conceptions expose challenges related to policy and practice and the roles undertaken by second-career academics, including their enculturation of students into the normative expectations of STEM professions, their influence on the apparent correspondence between HE and work in STEM, and their marketing of STEM professions inside HE.

Transitioning from industry to teaching in VET: profiles of VET teachers in Chile

PurposeSituated in the Chilean context, this study investigates how Vocational Education and Training (VET) teacher profiles, based on their perceptions of prior work experience in industry, relate to their current motivation and perception of teaching in VET. By doing so, the authors seek to provide valuable evidence to inform the development of policies to attract and maintain well-qualified teachers from industry in Chile and other countries facing similar changes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a descriptive cross-sectional design to collect data from 660 VET teachers using a two-scale instrument: Perception of Prior Occupation (PPO) and adapted FIT-Choice scales. By adopting a typological approach, the authors constructed profiles of VET teachers based on their perception of past industry experience. The authors then analyzed how these profiles vary regarding individual teacher characteristics, motivation and perception of teaching in VET.FindingsThe authors found a significant degree of heterogeneity among VET teachers' prior industry experiences, leading them to identify three distinct VET teacher profiles: “High Perception of Prior Occupation,” “Learning and Teaching-Oriented” and “Low Perception of Prior Occupation.” Notably, the most distinguishing characteristics across these profiles were age, VET teaching area, holding a job outside of teaching and years of prior industry experience. Furthermore, the authors found that motivation and perceptions of teaching varied significantly across these VET teacher profiles.Originality/valueThere needs to be more research on the factors that attract and retain industry workers as VET teachers in high schools. This study is among the first to address this topic in a non-European context.

University film schools at the heart of creative collaborations with industry: a case study

ABSTRACT This paper is a detailed case study of how the Bond University Film and Television School collaborated with external production companies to actively participate in, and support, the production of the $1.5 million feature film The Fear of Darkness as a means of providing a unique student learning and industry networking experience. Students were able to take genuine on-set production roles for the duration of the production, rather than conventional short-term internships and work experience, which, upon their graduation, has contributed towards meeting the industry’s current skills gap. Furthermore, this case study also shows how the production provided a significant opportunity for academic staff to have senior production roles to further their professional development. Additionally, this collaboration supports the notion that academic staff with significant prior industry experience can function as a useful conduit between film schools and industry.

Gender productivity gap: does gender-equal ownership compensate for female entrepreneurs’ lack of prior industry experience?

Gender productivity gap: does gender-equal ownership compensate for female entrepreneurs’ lack of prior industry experience?

Unstacking the Russian Doll: An Integrative Interdisciplinary Analysis of Restaurant Operations

Russian Doll, an independently owned and operated small ethnic restaurant serving handcrafted Russian food, opened its doors on January 1, 2015 in a rural river town in Southeast Missouri. The owner, Ana, had mastered many of her home country’s recipes and excelled in the kitchen. Her restaurant focused on introducing American audience to Russian culinary delights and culture, featuring authentic, made-to-order fare and a neighborly atmosphere. Ana had long dreamed of her own restaurant but without prior industry experience or formal training running the business wasn’t easy. In December 2015, after 1 year of operations, Ana found herself wondering how to proceed. Was Russian Doll a feasible entrepreneurial enterprise to begin with? Could Ana’s business be saved or was it time to call it quits and shut down?

Do the Winners Really Take It all? Exploring Entrepreneurial Learning in Start-Up Competitions

Originating from business plan competitions at universities, start-up competitions (SUCs) are nowadays a widely used policy tool to foster entrepreneurial learning among a larger group of potential and nascent entrepreneurs. While the literature on entrepreneurial learning highlights the importance of participants’ prior experiences, studies on learning in SUCs often ignore these experiences, but detect different perceptions of the learning outcomes from SUCs. To address this research gap, we explore configurations of prior experience and the participation routines of entrepreneurs at SUCs. To do so, we apply fuzzy-sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to in-depth interview data from 26 participants at two German SUCs. Based on theories on entrepreneurial learning, insights from the interviews, and our empirical results from fsQCA, we identify one necessary condition and two specific configurations of conditions that lead to the outcome. The absence of entrepreneurial knowledge was found to be a necessary condition for entrepreneurial learning in SUCs. Prior industry experience is part of both solutions, but whether the presence or absence of it is important depends on whether it is combined with active participation in the competition. We present implications for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

Financing constraints, home equity and selection into entrepreneurship

We exploit a mortgage reform that differentially unlocked home equity across the Danish population and study how this impacted selection into entrepreneurship. We find that increased entry was concentrated among entrepreneurs whose firms were founded in industries where they had no prior work experience. Nevertheless, we find that marginal entrants benefiting from the reform had higher pre-entry earnings and a significant share of these entrants started longer-lasting firms. Our results are most consistent with a view that housing collateral enabled higher ability individuals with less-well-established track records to overcome credit rationing and start new firms, rather than only leading to ‘frivolous entry’ by those without prior industry experience.

Drawing the ostensive globally, creatively enacting locally: Dispersed knowledge & routines creation

Routines are essential to structure a new venture; however, we know little about how entrepreneurs develop new patterns of action in entrepreneurial settings where they cannot count on routine transfer and prior industry knowledge. In such contexts, entrepreneurs must draw from pools of knowledge to shape ostensive prescriptions and performance enactment. How do entrepreneurs interact with different knowledge sources to assemble the routines of a new venture? This paper conducts a qualitative analysis of the process of routine formation in four coffee ventures launched autonomously by entrepreneurs with no prior industry experience. The analysis connects the process of routines formation to the micro-dynamics that shaped the entrepreneurs' interaction with global and local knowledge. The study leverages insights from the study of global knowledge creation to highlight the mechanisms through which the entrepreneurs extracted ostensive components from global knowledge prescriptions and enacted them through performances modulated by local creative instances.

Dynamic managerial capabilities and entrant survival: insights from the solar PV industry life cycle

This study identifies the dynamic management capabilities which command firms’ survival in their entries into both new and uncertain industries at the maturity stage of an industry lifecycle. Through quantitative data analysis, we reveal that the effect of these capabilities is asymmetrical: whilst dynamic management capabilities (reflected by prior industry experience of executive management) do not assist in entry during the evolution stage, more so, the length of prior industry experience available to entrants at a time of entry correlates to post-entry mortality rates, these capabilities are important to succeed in market entry during the maturity stage of an ILC. Our analysis comprises data from the energy sector during the evolution and maturity stages of solar photovoltaic industry. The empirical setting of the energy sector over the last three decades provides a fresh an ideal domain in which to test the success of entry timing decisions at various stage of an industry lifecycle in uncertain industry. Our results overwhelmingly support our central thesis regarding the specific impact of dynamic management capabilities on post-entry survival. We test and find a partial support for our hypotheses by analysing the acquisitions and joint ventures of 149 energy firms in years between 1997 and 2016. These findings have important implications for the literature on entry timing and dynamic management capabilities.

Digital start-up access to venture capital financing: What signals quality?

What signals quality for digital startups seeking access to external finance? Analyzing a unique dataset from India, we investigate the impact of traditional quality signals (e.g., the founders’ years of experience, prior industry experience); networking signals (e.g., degrees from elite educational institutes, the breadth of an entrepreneurial team); and digital signals (e.g., the social media presence of the startup on multiple social media sites) on the access to venture capital financing. We find that while networking and digital signals positively impact access to financing, traditional human capital signals do not have any significant impact on the process.

When do serial entrepreneurs found innovative ventures? Evidence from patent data

Experienced entrepreneurs are typically considered to be wellsprings of both wealth creation and innovation. However, given that prior research has provided evidence of an inverse relationship between economic performance and innovation performance, innovation performance of experienced entrepreneurs requires greater scrutiny. In this study, we examine the question: under what conditions do serial entrepreneurs produce impactful innovations in their subsequent ventures? Using data on 334 VC-funded companies, our study suggests that the familiarity garnered by founders through their prior industry experience may limit the venture’s propensity to produce impactful innovation. Our findings contribute to the literature on serial entrepreneurship and innovation.

What entrepreneurs do? Entrepreneurial action guided by entrepreneurial opportunities and entrepreneurial learning in early internationalising firms

PurposeThere is a growing interest in exploring the interface between international marketing and entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper contributes by defining and elucidating entrepreneurial action in early internationalising software firms and the corresponding emergent international marketing activities. Entrepreneurial action in early internationalising software firms is explored through the operationalisation of a reconceptualised entrepreneurial opportunity construct and the associated entrepreneurial learning processes.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts an inductive approach, which traces the evolution of five early internationalising propriety software South African firms; from the new venture idea to the establishment of the international entrepreneurial opportunity.FindingsThe findings provide support for entrepreneurial action guided by: prior industry experience, entrepreneurial alertness, opportunity confidence and two levels of entrepreneurial learning; experiential and double-loop learning. Learning by doing allows for the continuous evaluation of the new venture idea leading to the international entrepreneurial opportunity. Market responsiveness and continuous product development resulting in the emergence of the firm's inward international marketing activities constitute the key outcomes of entrepreneurial action.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited to a specific technology context, which is young software firms whose inward directed internationalisation activities coalesce around the development of their proprietary software technology.Originality/valueBased on an original dataset of early internationalising software firms from South Africa, this paper inductively operationalises and conceptualises entrepreneurial action as the combined interaction of four key constructs: contingent effects, attitudes to opportunities, learning by doing and entrepreneurial activities leading to the firm's inward international marketing activities and a diversified international client and end-user base.

Crowdfunded and then? The role of intellectual capital in the growth of equity-crowdfunded companies

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate whether and to what extent equity crowdfunding (ECF) is able to build enduring businesses. This research explores the post-campaign growth of equity-crowdfunded companies and analyses the impact of intellectual capital (IC) on their growth. To achieve the above aim, we provide a theoretical framework that includes the three well-known dimensions of IC – i.e. human, structural and relational capital – as independent variables and company growth, meant as sales and employment growth, as dependent variable.Design/methodology/approachThis research uses a quantitative methodology based on two regression analyses. The authors use hand-collected data on 51 successful equity-crowdfunded projects listed on seven Italian platforms.FindingsThe authors find that three variables, namely prior industry experience (human-capital), product innovation (structural-capital) and equity offered (relational-capital) are significant and positively related to the growth of equity-crowdfunded companies. In particular, prior industry experience positively influences sales growth; product innovation positively influences employment growth. Equity offered, instead, has a strong positive impact on both sales and employment growth. Companies that offer a larger percentage of equity during the campaign disclose higher probabilities of growth.Practical implicationsThe study has useful implications for several stakeholders, in particular, founders, platform managers, crowdfunders, policy makers and authorities.Originality/valueThe results shed some light on the nascent research field related to post-campaign scenarios of equity-crowdfunded companies. This paper is the first to explore the impact of IC on the growth of companies funded through ECF.

Entrepreneurial teams' acquisition of talent: Evidence from technology manufacturing industries using a two‐sided approach

AbstractResearch summaryOne of the established findings in the spinout literature is that founders with prior industry experience assemble larger entrepreneurial teams and create better‐performing startups. We examine the role of prior industry experience in the startups' next stage—its hiring of new employees. We tackle two empirical challenges—the mutual aspect of hiring and the effect of unobserved variables on employees' earnings using a two‐sided matching model. Our results reveal that even firms founded by entrepreneurs without industry experience can attract new employees with such experience if the founders start with a large entrepreneurial team. Further, startups provide new hires with an earnings premium for their industry experience. Our approach illustrates the benefits of matching models over traditional regressions.Managerial summaryGrowing startups face the question of who to hire and how much to compensate the new hires. Simultaneously, prospective new hires ask which startup to join and how much their salary will be. We explore these questions using a novel method that tackles the mutual selection process. In the context of five technological manufacturing industries, we find that having industry experience within founding teams may not be necessary to attract new hires with high quality if the startup can signal its own quality through other means such as having a larger founding team. Our results indicate that startups prefer employees with industry experience for which startups offer a wage premium. Thus, employees seeking startup employment benefit from gaining industry experience prior to joining a startup.A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/w00YzYi5VqA.

Development of a 3D Interactive Training Platform for Assembly of Bogie Unit in the Railcar Learning Factory

In South Africa rail commuting remains affordable than other means of transport. However, about 2.3 million rail commuters often complain about the inefficiency and unreliability of rail transport. In response to this, the rail car manufacturing industry and its value chain is attaining notable investments geared towards localizing production of train components. The challenge for learning institutions is to supply the concerned industry with ready to work graduates, hence the realisation of the Rail Car Learning Factory. This paper presents the development of a 3D interactive training platform for graduate engineers employed in rail manufacturing without prior industry experience. The first section is a literature review defining various simulation-based training platforms; the second section illustrates human-centred design approach for designing and developing the proposed desktop-based application due to its affordability, scalability and ease of development; the last section highlights the most significant phase in developing a training environment and prescribes future work.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Assessment in the Surgical Cotton Gauze and Bandage Cloth Cluster

Creating a sustainable entrepreneurial environment is vital for the success of cluster development. Surgical cotton and Bandage Cloth manufacturing is the traditional business for the people at Chatrapatti, Tamil Nadu, India. This cluster has more than 100 micro enterprises providing employment and contributing significantly to export. This research aims to assess the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Chatrapatti. A structured questionnaire is framed and collected from the 55 entrepreneurs at Chatrapatti and the result reveals that 92 percent of the entrepreneurs started sole proprietorship type of business without any business family background. 70 percent of them are degree or diploma holders, the majority of them are in the age category of 25 and above without prior industry experience from the same industry. The result reveals that capital, labor and raw material availability are the most influential factor to venture into the bandage cloth manufacturing business. Desire to make money, fear of unemployment and passion for self-employment are the highly motivating factors for starting the business. The entrepreneurs’ skill assessment reveals that the entrepreneurs have good ability in fundraising and estimating the cash flows for the business. They have good negotiating and communication skill but lack the strategy for promoting the product using the social media and website for reaching the global market. Research result highlighted that the entrepreneurs are having good networking with supplier, and good ability in inventory management. Factor analysis revealed that the friends and family support, network, the success of friends in business are the highly motivating factors for starting the business. The entrepreneurs felt that the municipality compliance regarding the pollution control highly affects their business and need support from government to implement recycling technologies and supportive funding for implementing

Industry and leadership experiences of the heads of departments and their impact on the performance of public universities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify whether the prior industry experience (IE) or industry leadership experience (ILE) of the head might influence the department’s publication output, the ability to acquire external research funds or its entrepreneurial activities (e.g. the commercialization of research results through patents).Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on data from 208 Austrian university departments and combines data from different sources (CVs of the heads of departments, commercial register, funding data and publication data).FindingsThe results show a positive relationship between ILE and the patent output of the departments as one indicator for the commercialization of research activities. Low positive effects of IE on the extent of third-party funding were also found. Furthermore, the scientific experience of the head of department has a positive influence on the publication output of the whole department.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that the scientific ability of researchers should be key when selecting the head of a department, due to the fact that scientific performance is still essential for most of these units. However, when universities seek to focus more strongly on other, for example, entrepreneurial activities, then additional competencies come into play. As the actual focus of universities is currently subject to change, former IE and ILE will become increasingly more important and the heads of departments will play a decisive role in the transition toward becoming an entrepreneurial university. Therefore, universities are well advised to integrate these experiences in the job specifications and to establish processes that facilitate the change from an industrial to a university job or which allow “double lives” in university and industry.Originality/valuePrevious studies have mostly investigated the role of the scientific experience of academic leaders in the research performance of their institution in later decades. This study examines the actual relevance of previous entrepreneurial experiences of heads of departments to the departments’ research performance, the ability to acquire external research funds or their entrepreneurial activities.

The tortoise, the hare, and the hybrid: effects of prior employment on the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Abstract Prior employment imprints nascent entrepreneurs with logics for organizing startups. Within a regional ecosystem, entrepreneurs with different employment backgrounds pursue alternative entrepreneurial pathways, each generating distinct, though complementary, regional impacts. By analyzing diverse pre-entrepreneurial employment experiences, no one pathway leads to superior firm performance; prior industry experience generates strong early performance that tapers off, while prior academic experience engenders slow, steady, long-lasting growth. Our approach is well-suited for theorizing ecosystem development and generating policy recommendations in support of ecosystem diversity.

Parental endowments versus business acumen: Assessing the fate of low‐tech, service‐sector spinouts

AbstractResearch SummaryIn recent years, scholarship on intraindustry entrepreneurial spinouts has coalesced around a heredity‐focused perspective, propounding the notion that spinouts from high‐quality parent‐firms outperform those emanating from low‐quality parent‐firms. This view has found strong support in high‐tech sectors, but it is unclear whether parental lineage is a determinant of performance and survival in sectors exhibiting low‐technological dynamism, especially when the locus of value creation stems from generalist rather than technical‐specialist knowledge. Applying the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship and jack‐of‐all‐trades framework, we assess the fate of a complete population of 678 service‐sector firms for the entire 32‐year history of an industry. Our study offers explanatory mechanisms that more fully account for the non‐hereditary success factors driving performance heterogeneity among entrepreneurial spinouts.Managerial SummaryIn many industries, half or more of the firms are founded by former employees of existing companies (i.e., “entrepreneurial spinouts”). In high‐tech sectors, these “spinouts” often appear to perform better than entrants without prior industry experience. Moreover, spinouts spawned by high‐performing parent‐firms tend to out‐perform spinouts from low‐performing parents, suggesting that spinouts benefit from advantageous parental knowledge and capabilities. However, this does not seem to be the case among spinouts in industries characterized by low‐technological dynamism. Our findings indicate that when technological dynamism is low, general business acumen eclipses parental lineage in determining spinout performance. In these cases, spinout founders with primarily technical experience would be well‐served by partnering with individuals possessing experience in marketing, sales, and day‐to‐day business management.

Firm survival in traded industries: does localization moderate the effects of founding team experience?

Prior studies of the impact of founder team industry and start-up experience on firm survival have paid little attention to location decisions or cluster effects. In this paper, we focus on young firms doing business in industries that compete for customers in geographically dispersed markets (traded industries). We examine whether regional concentrations (localization) of related industrial firms moderate the effects of founder team industry and start-up experience on firm survival. The study draws on firm-level data from the Kauffman Firm Survey and on county business patterns data from the US Census Bureau. We found that localization negatively moderates the positive effects of founder team prior industry experience on firm survival. We did not find significant moderating effects of localization on founder team prior start-up experience. Our findings highlight the importance of accounting for location decisions and cluster effects when evaluating the human capital inputs of founder teams.